On a day that could use some (possibly) bright news, there’s this: Philip Larkin will be getting a memorial stone in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner. He’ll be in fine company: Geoffrey Chaucer and Charles Dickens have graves at the site, while Jane Austen, George Eliot, Lewis Carroll, and Edward Lear have floor stones or wall tablets.
But then there’s this: Larkin didn’t really crave company. (An early poem, “Wants,” concludes: “Beyond all this, the wish to be alone.”) And his relationship to the church was vexed, at best. (One of his book reviews begins: “It was the verse about becoming again as a little child that caused the first sharp waning of my Christian sympathies.”) Reflecting on the Poets’ Corner announcement today in the Guardian, Holly Baxter proposes a less orthodox memorial spot:
Larkin may have been a grumpy, prejudiced curmudgeon, but he was our grumpy, prejudiced curmudgeon. He belongs in a place that doesn’t skate over the difficulties of life, rather than a place that includes him so long as its keepers can ignore his more demanding questions and falsely amplify the more virtuous parts of his legacy. I liked Larkin as a writer, who stared the more disgusting and inconvenient elements of life in the face and then swore liberally about them in uncompromising verse. On a personal level, I’m not sure we’d have got on. But I can’t stand to see him memorialized in a space so antithetical to the no-bullshit ideology he lived his creative life by.
In honor of that no-bullshit ideology, I’d like to offer a half-dozen of my favorite Larkin utterances, pulled from various interviews. My best guess: none of these will appear as an inscription on his Westminster Abbey memorial stone.
* Asked about the unhappiness that fills so many of his poems, Larkin answered, “Actually, I like to think of myself as quite funny, and I hope this comes through in my writing. But it’s unhappiness that provokes a poem. . . . Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.”
* Asked to explicate one of his poems, he responded, “I remember saying once, I can’t understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: it’s like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife. Whoever I was talking to said, They’d do that, too, if their agents could fix it.”
* Asked about his daily routine, he said, “My life is as simple as I can make it. Work all day, then cook, eat, wash up, telephone, hack writing, drink and television in the evenings. I almost never go out. I suppose everyone tries to ignore the passing of time: some people by doing a lot, being in California one year and Japan the next; or there’s my way—making every day and every year exactly the same. Probably neither works.”
* Responding to critics who accused his poems of depicting a “uniquely dreary life,” he said, “I’d like to know how . . . [they] spend their time. Do they kill a lot of dragons for instance?”
* Asked if he’d been to America, he answered, “Oh no, I haven’t been to America, or anywhere else, for that matter. . . . And of course I’m so deaf now that I shouldn’t dare. Someone would say, What about Ashbery, and I’d say, I’d prefer strawberry, that kind of thing.”
* Asked if growing old worried him, he answered, “Yes, dreadfully. If you assume you’re going to live to be seventy, seven decades, and think of each decade as a day of the week, starting with Sunday, then I’m on Friday afternoon now. Rather a shock, isn’t it? If you ask why does it bother me, I can only say I dread endless extinction.”
